Welcome to the Moneyball economy. With a fraction of a point separating competitors in this economy, the next strategic bet companies need to make to stay ahead of the competition is investing in applications that enable data driven decisions.  Using business analytics as a competitive advantage is a modern problem. And modern problems require modern solutions.

The last mile of analytics is broken – and we’re fooled by the noise
Think about it. You can ask a large number of your colleagues at work to start a fantasy football pool, create a plan and forecast who’s going to win in matter of minutes – reports, stats, and graphics with embedded collaboration so everyone can actively participate and affect the outcome. Where is the analytics equivalent in the enterprise? In general, we are mired in spreadsheets and antiquated tools for financial and operational planning and analytics. We have enormous books of reports that hardly anyone reads, dashboards that only a few people understand, and all of it is out of context. This results in incredible frustration for business users. They’ve been conditioned by their consumer experiences: simple, elegant and actionable interfaces, and they are demanding more from their enterprise experience. Without the engagement of these users, it will be impossible to align strategy with execution in the Moneyball economy.

And then there is the challenge of dealing with increased amounts of data and an overhyped Big Data industry. The few people with the power to provide analysis to the organization often fall prey to the tendency to cherry-pick what they think matters most and provide a subset of the data that fits what they want to believe. The larger the data set becomes, the harder it is to tell the correct story – we are fooled by the noise more than ever.

Frustration, not necessity, is the mother of invention
When we started Tidemark three years ago, we set out to re-imagine business analytics. At the core, my belief, shaped by years of seeking freedom growing up in a communist country, is that analytic applications that give companies a way to better understand their business and empower more people within an organization to make intelligent business decisions is a wonderful way forward for the enterprise analytics space. Over the last year we have introduced financial and operational analytic applications that are helping companies gain visibility, transparency and competitive advantage that is unprecedented.

Having put in place the fundamentals (analytical processes, a user experience designed for the business user, in-context collaboration, analysis, assumptions, and modeling that is mobile first) we turned our attention to the last mile – how to tell the story of what’s happening.

Born from the frustration of the antiquated and fatigued offerings for business reporting and dashboarding, we wanted to innovate and re-imagine what business reporting should look like in the 21^st century. Freeing business users from tools designed for the era of green-bar reports and static, out of context dashboards and visualizations became our guiding light, and the cornerstone for our latest release of applications.

We wanted a new way to help companies create, tell and share their stories with the world. This democratization of information drives actionability and ultimately helps companies transform themselves to better compete, growing revenue and profit.

What’s the story anyway?
Today, as part of our spring ’13 release, we are introducing Tidemark Storylines™  – an innovative way for organizations to create, share and impact their performance in the context of financial and operational processes. Storylines provide a way for everyone in the organization to tell the story and actively participate  in driving the performance of the company forward.

Tidemark Storylines are actionable visualizations that are dynamically generated – weaving together internal data, segmentation (products, regions, customers), unstructured contextual data (assumptions, comments, annotations) and large streams correlation (Twitter™, Bloomberg™, RFID data). This combination is used to create the contextual narrative of what’s happening in your business and what you can do about it.

These data visualizations tell the real story of vital business processes - Overall Company Health, What Happens If, Forecast Variances, Profitability, and People – and are grounded in real-time data that lets users instantly understand the impact of taking action.

Storylines combine visualizations with actions – the data set is composed on-demand based on what the business users need and how they want to participate. .

Even more exciting, Tidemark Storylines™ can be easily shared across the entire organization, bringing freedom of access and action to people that have never before been served by analytics providers.

As an example, telling the story of profitability provides:

• Real-time analysis of company performance and the customers, regions, products and channels that are making the greatest impact
• Dynamic control of how specific actions impact overall profitability with a visual depiction of what happens and why

And since most of the data that matters in today’s volatile market exists outside the walls of the enterprise, we also bring in external data and correlate it into the context of the story. Some examples include:

• Correlation of external insights (weather reports, financial market insight, social conversations, etc.) with internal information for a holistic view of the data

• Integration of assumptions, annotations and conversations to enrich the context of what’s happening and why

• Tidemark Actions that allow users to go directly into the analytical process that was used to create the story and share the impact of their changes;

Here’s the entire Storyline and the Tidemark analytical process that generated it:

Tidemark Storylines further our mission to democratize business analytics by providing actionability to make intelligent decisions.

I am very excited and humbled to share the story that shaped Tidemark Storylines, and I am extremely grateful to our customers, our close partners, my amazing team and the support of our board in bring it to life.

To learn more, go to http://www.tidemark.net/storylines or follow @TidemarkEPM or me on Twitter @optian.

When I started Tidemark, I began with a marvelous vision for the company. In my mind, the story’s intricate and powerful details fit together like a Beethoven symphony, but when I told the story to investors I sounded like a tone-deaf drunk in a karaoke bar.  What the hell happened?

It turns out that coming up with the story is entirely different than articulating the story. In fact, articulating the story can be more time consuming and difficult than inventing it in the first place.

Despite being incredibly hard, as a founder there is perhaps nothing more important than being able to convey the story arc of your vision, of what you are after and why it matters. Pitch perfect.

Often we have to do so with a large array and diverse audience. Why should customers care about what you are offering? Are you a “must-have” or a nicer way to do something that’s already done? How are you different? Why are you after this?

Armiliato as Giancarlo in To Rome with Love

*In Woody Allen’s excellent To Rome with Love, Giancarlo a proud father who’s day job is that of a mortician, sings in the shower and Jerry, a retired—and critically reviled—opera director played by Allen himself, feels inspired to bring Giancarlo’s gift to the public. Jerry convinces a reluctant Giancarlo to audition in front of a room of opera bigwigs, but Giancarlo performs poorly in this setting.

What Jerry realizes is that Giancarlo’s talent is tied to the comfort and freedom he feels in the shower and in a particularly funny and smart series of scenes, Jerry and Giancarlo decide to stage the opera Pagliacci, with an incongruous shower present in all scenes. Giancarlo receives rave reviews. We are all, of course, perfect singing in the car by ourselves.

Short of bringing the shower with us every time we talk about what we are building, what are some of the things that can help remove the karaoke effect?

Here are some things that I found helpful:

• Embrace solitude and precision. In a recent New York Times interview, Jerry Seinfeld talks about his creative process seeking perfection. He will nurse a single joke for years, amending, abridging and reworking it incrementally, to get the thing just so.
• Freedom to pursue the improbable removes the uncomfortable feeling that nobody gets your story. As Aaron Levie the CEO and Co-Founder of Box passionately talks about in Be on a mission that doesn’t suck working on something that is ambitious, improbable, and fundamentally thrilling will keep you cranking day after day, constantly refining and seeking what matters.
• Be quotable. Strive for a clear, concise and quotable foundational story as the glue that holds and inspires the management team, the various teams inside the company and your early customers.
• Practice makes perfect.  There is no other way around the “10,000 hour rule” that Malcolm Gladwell introduced with his book, Outliers.

Telling your story isn’t just about marketing. It’s about leadership. Great people will only want to pursue great visions. If you can’t articulate your potential greatness, you will never hire and motivate the kind of people who will make it happen.

Anyone up for a rendition of “Dream On” by Aerosmith?

Christian Gheorghe is the Founder and CEO of Tidemark.net a cloud-based enterprise analytics company re-imaging business analytics for business people. He can be reached at cgheorghe@tidemark.net or @optian on twitter.

*The synopsis for To Rome with Love is from Wikipedia lightly edited for readability.